


Daemon Meme - Crash Standing

by Asuka Kureru (Askerian)



Series: the family you choose [6]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen, Post-Sburb/Sgrub
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-05
Updated: 2016-01-18
Packaged: 2017-12-07 14:13:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/749429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askerian/pseuds/Asuka%20Kureru
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fusion with Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials/the Golden Compass.<br/>--</p><p>Karkat doesn't know what to do with his daemon. (None of the trolls do; Terezi hides it a little better but in the week she's been sharing the Striders' apartment Davesprite doesn't count the times he found her sitting in silence on the couch, or in the staircase to the roof, that horrific alligator-mawed, hollow-bellied hound-thing of hers staring back at her with his head on her knee, both trying to make sense of each other.)</p><p>It's funny because neither does Davesprite, really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Three-sentence fic which I wrote separately but which gives a bit of background explanation:  
> \--
> 
> "She's so _precious_ ," Karkat said, and burst into tears, holding the dwarf bunny/hedgehog-looking thing against his chest so tight the daemon squeaked a little.
> 
> John and Jade shared a bright goofy grin over Karkat's bowed head; who would have thought that crossing over into the alpha kids' session would finally fix that gaping absence at the trolls' side?
> 
> Jade's thylacine nosed gently at the brand new little ball of fluff, and got pricked for his trouble.

Karkat doesn't know what to do with his daemon. None of the trolls do; Terezi hides it a little better but in the week she's been sharing their apartment Byrd doesn't count the times he found her sitting in silence on the couch, or in the staircase to the roof, that horrific alligator-mawed, hollow-bellied hound-thing of hers staring back at her with his head on her knee, both trying to make sense of each other.

It's funny because neither does Byrd, really.

Three years without, and then he's home and he's human again. He tries to lean on his right arm he crashes to the floor, nose in an old pizza box, and then Bowie is here fluttering awkwardly at his side like she forgot how to, in the three years she was gone, the three years he was less than human in almost all possible ways.

His Bowie, not Dave's Bowie. They won't mix them up in a hurry, even discounting the missing chunks. His is white as bleached bone now.

"Did you change her name?" Karkat asks him without looking his way, sitting awkwardly on the couch before a show they're not watching. "Since you changed yours."

Byrd stretches his legs before him, hums distractedly. The rook is perched on the back of the couch, between his head and Karkat's, and she tilts her head this and that way as she stares down at the mishmash of dwarf bunny and hedgehog on the far end of the couch, the one that Karkat is determinedly not petting.

"Still haven't found a name for yours?" she asks, and caws almost as a joke.

Karkat and his daemon turn to frown at Byrd's in unplanned concert. The daemon doesn't speak; she doesn't do it much, not like Karkat at all. She looks so uneasy in her own skin, like she's wary of reminding Karkat she exists.

If his daemon could still fly she'd probably divebomb them and try to lift her off the couch just long enough to drop her on Karkat's lap.

(She can't, she can just hop and flutter a little, she's grounded.)

"Can't figure out what would fit. I'm no good at naming things, okay? And she says she has no preference." A short, annoyed sigh. "Come on, share, a miracle might happen and inspiration might descend unto me."

"Hm. Okay then. If you insist." Silence.

Karkat kicks his ankle, not too hard yet. It'll change soon. "I'm insisting, you douche."

"Hyum'n," Byrd says. "Pronounced like human."

Karkat groans and shoves at his shoulder. "Oh, get out."

"... Shouldn't that be Mamm'l?" inquires the nameless daemon, one ear up, one ear down like she's quirking an eyebrow. "To keep with the theme."

Byrd and Hyum'n exchange a look. (Byrd is barely tripped up by the color, all wrong.) Shit, it totally should have been.

"Striders work in mysterious ways." They turn back to Karkat. "Don't forget the silent apostrophe, it's super important."

"I'm serious, get the fuck out."

"And the pretentious accent--"

"Fuck you so much."


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Awake at Night ficlet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked: How about Awake at Night with daemons?

John’s guests suddenly acquiring daemons upon entering this universe – John and Aiolos are delighted; Paul and Magda horrified – certainly explains a lot of their first day in the Egbert household. The sudden baffled silences, the jumps and startles, the brief but intense screaming fits between Karkat and his… long-tailed rabbit? Hedgehog hare? It has the back legs and the face, though not the ears.

(Paul politely pretends not to listen to the backs and forths between the children and their new (how? were they soulless before? he cannot imagine that) daemons. It reveals more than Karkat would probably like of the depth of his self-image issues.)

(Paul does not know what a cholerbear is or why his daemon is totally wrong in not being one.)

The thing is… the (nameless) daemons are strange, and their lack of familiar dynamic with their humans, but they are still daemons, still soul reflections.

It does not matter what polite and pleasant guests Karkat and Gamzee are attempting to be, it takes him and Magda approximately eight hours to fully accept what they see.

The hedgebunny jerks to the end of her tether whenever he approaches from behind, and when he raises his voice (to call John from another room) she rolls up and goes frozen, a ball of spikes too terrified to move.

Gamzee’s funny-walking, clumsy, sleepy-faced six-legged beast won’t stop growling. It looks nothing like a rabid wolverine in the face or tail and yet the comparison is too easily made.

They will allow Aiolos to _perch_ on them – Karkat’s hedgebunny even grooms him back, just once – but whenever Magda waddles into a room the bunny jumps to burrow under the not-a-wolverine, and then attempt to climb over her instead to make a shield of her spikes, and then Paul follows and she freezes, and Gamzee’s awkwardly cute beast unveils the fact that it is half maw, and half the maw is teeth, several rows, like a shark with thick dog teeth instead of neat, flat triangles.

He spends three days trying to reassure them in subtle ways and watching them pretend badly to believe him before he sits them down and gives them the only reassurance he knows.

He explains penguins to them, penguins half-starving over their egg for months on end so it’ll stay warm and hatch and grow up safe, penguins huddling with other penguins because alone you die.

This is him – and Magda is not quite ready to offer to brood them too – and he does not know what their daemons mean about them, but they have been good friends to John and John survived because of that and it would be reason enough not to kick them off the ice.

Alone you die. So don’t be alone. Don’t let people be alone.

He’s ready to wait as long as it takes for them to hatch.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked: daemon AU prompts, fyc!verse the Dads have wildly different daemons to the confusion of everyone else

So the thing about Crockpop and Dadbert is, they look the same, they dress the same, and… yeah, okay the way they write is not the same -- Crockpop likes his stern uppercases -- but otherwise they even have the same syntax and shit.

You stand there on the quay right next to the giant fucking canoe that’s gonna be yout floating home for the next month, Hyum’n on your shoulder tweaking your ear like she wants to make sure you’re seeing what she’s fucking seeing, and you bat at her without even caring that she might fall off your shoulder.

Because holy shit.

You _guess_ both their daemons waddle, but holy shit.

Magda is still a penguin. The way both Bro and Dirk have seaside predatory birds –- osprey and seagull -– the way Roxy's got a lynx and Mom a snow leopard, you were expecting a similarity there, too. Another bird, or another polar animal, or something in the same parental league...

Magda is a penguin, fluffy and sleek in her little permanent evening suit.

Miriam is a fucking _alligator_.

"I guess we know which one is the evil twin," Hyum'n and Dave's Bowie chorus accidentally, and you sigh and say nothing as Hyum'n, née Bowie, launches her newly albinoed feathered ass across the divide between your and Dave's shoulders to kick some crow ass for an anti-jinx.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alligators are hella great parents actually. XD

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Daemon Meme - Crash Standing [PODFIC]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8830984) by [Opalsong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opalsong/pseuds/Opalsong)




End file.
